I hate to say it, because it comes out of place of defensiveness (especially since they’re supposed to be a conservative magazine that mainstreams right wing ideas to a large extent), but this article in Politico defending the media’s “unbalanced” approach to the election is right. It’s true that the media has had more “negative” stories about McCain and more “positive” ones about Obama, but, to quote Politico, there’s a reason for this.
As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.
But that statement alone shows how much the misleading phrase “fair and balanced” has led the press astray. Because you can be fair (to the public and to the candidates) or you can be balanced, but unless you have equally matched candidates, you can’t be both. Already the desire to be balanced has led to statements like the one above, a basic admission that the press coverage is wholly dominated by campaigning, and that they fear treading into the oh so dangerous territory of reporting on the different candidate’s histories and policy proposals to give voters straight information about how each candidate will affect them. There are exceptions, of course, like this piece the whole country should read before they vote. But in general, it’s scary to talk about policy overly much, because then the glaring differences between the candidates will emerge and can’t be dismissed as partisan claptrap, as much as the McCain campaign would like to say otherwise. Policy is definitely not balanced between the two, as far as the public goes. Take this economic crisis. Most people are going on thin reality-based information about the two candidates indeed, and are subject to wild and misleading claims being made by the McCain campaign and amplified through the media about how Obama is going to turn us all into communists. And yet even on weak information, they still realize that Obama’s just better on the question of how to handle the economic crisis without screwing them over. That’s the sort of qualitative policy difference that automatically makes coverage unbalanced, and so the solution for the mainstream media, especially on TV, is to obscure that with horse race talk, or worse, try to game it by giving a handicap to the weakling.